Tag: Snippet

The room smelled faintly of dirty cloth diapers and spit up, but he’d gone nose-blind to the odor weeks ago. As he stared up at the varnished ceiling beams, Jacks listened to the baby sleep. For two days, he’d been trying to do the math to figure out exactly how many weeks old she was. He was disgusted that he didn’t know his own child’s age. The day before, he finally picked a number – sixteen weeks – but no, as he stared at the damn ceiling, that didn’t seem right. She was already rolling over, trying to sit up. Did babies her age sit up, he wondered. Would she be crawling soon? He scratched at his beard and added a month. Twenty weeks. That sounded right, too.

“Fuck,” he whispered into the room.

A gust of snow slammed against the window, and he sprang up on an elbow, expecting to see Lily stir herself awake, but she stayed asleep, dreaming whatever dreams babies had. He flopped back down onto the lumpy pillow and rolled onto his side so he could see the edge of her hotel-standard crib. He’d been thinking about her mother a lot. Ana would know how old her damn kid was, even if she was a bitch the entire time he knew her. Moms were good with that kind of stuff. He cursed again and punched the pillow into a more comfortable shape.

His eyes had finally closed from exhaustion when something in the hall broke, and bodies began slamming into the walls. At first Jacks thought he had immediately slipped into a nightmare, so he rubbed his face, hoping the noises would fade away. But when the dog began to wildly bark, and Lily woke up screaming shortly after, he realized whatever was happening in the hall was real. He launched out of the bed and across his room, and pressed his ear to the cold door. His heart thudded in his chest, but not for his safety, for Lily’s. She was too young to survive without him, and after losing Win, Jacks was acutely aware of how important his role as a father truly was…

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With our brows touching, and his voice just above a whisper, the air from his mouth hits mine when he speaks. “We’ve been on the precipice of almost lovers since we met. You and me, we’re just lost in an impossible, endless dream. There was a reason we met, but it wasn’t for love, was it? I understand that now.

– Dying to Know, book 4 of The Station Series

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Read on for a taste of Hutch and A’ris…

Hutch was used to taking what he needed and moving on. And yes, he thought A’ris was an easy means to an end if she was willing to fund his passage through the Outer Provinces. Once he reached the Outer Banks, he could use some of his escort money to buy a skiff or possibly something better — a one way ticket off the driest planet in the universe on an air ship. He wouldn’t make the same mistake he did with the Workers. He wouldn’t let the persuasions of the female form sway him to stick around longer than he was needed. Not again.

But there was something else about the girl that drew him in. Something anxious hid behind her gaze and Hutch had half a mind to find out what it was. She was far too young and well-kept to have been in severe trouble recently. At least that’s what he told himself.

As Hutch made his way back to Besnik’s tent, avoiding the nervous faces he passed, he did his best to shrug off his curiosity over A’ris Brynx and tried to tell himself that his work relationship with the kid was already stamped with an expiration date. Typically, he wouldn’t have it any other way. Even if it meant he had to leave the girl on the road, alone, with only the winds to push her forward. Hell, it wasn’t his journey.

He told himself exactly what he would do: take the money and run.

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Murder was a messy business; torture even less clean. As Hutch walked through the inn’s lobby, taking care to avoid the streams of dried blood that had drained from [the woman’s] body, he struggled to swallow. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen such a thing and he doubted it would be the last. But seeing the most evil side of human nature was never easy.

Each fingernail had been wrenched from [her] hands, as were the front teeth from her upper jaw. One eye was sealed shut, lost beneath a contusion the size of a lemon. A clean split opened her lower lip, giving her mouth an un-natural ‘V’ shape. As he looked at her features, it was hard for him to see where her nostrils had been, as dried blood had caked in clumps around her unrecognizable nose.

He kneeled at her side and touched the wire binding that strung her wrists and ankles together. The woman hadn’t been kind to them, not exactly, but hers was a fate undeserved. Hutch didn’t doubt a bag of coins would have opened her mouth freely to the comings and goings of A’ris and Hutch, and yet the level of torture the middle-aged woman endured wasn’t just unnecessary, it was brutal beyond reason. As if whoever committed the crime did so with the pure intent to kill, regardless of what information they extracted.

He smoothed the hair from her face and pulled a nearby throw off a wooden chair, draping it over her still body. She’d been bled dry, and though the entire room would forever show signs of her demise on the floors, walls and counters, he could at the very least give her soul respect by covering her violated body.

Someone out there was angry.

As Hutch took the stairs up to the room he’d shared with A’ris just days before, and found it cleaned out and empty, he could only hope that the dead man behind the Gear Maker’s shop was the man who had gone through the town, eliminating all who breathed. Either all signs of A’ris were being wiped clean, or any and all who crossed her path were struck dead simply for seeing her. Hutch knew A’ris was in trouble or soon would be.

The kind of trouble that drew blood in lethal amounts.

“A’ris, please be safe,” he whispered into the fresh sky.

His boots sank into the damp earth as he set off to the west with a pack of supplies he pillaged from [the inn’s] kitchen. Hutch didn’t even bother to change his muddy clothes, just slung a coat over his shoulder in case it should rain again. The bartender wouldn’t need it anymore. He, along with his patrons, had been shot dead.

Unsure if the hole in his heart was truly mended or would only heal once he set eyes upon the girl again, living and unharmed, he set out for the town of Calypso, determined to find what he had lost…